Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

  With the horses came a dozen hard-bitten veterans of the range who accepted Black Jasmine as their mascot from the first moment he showed up at their campfire. They nicknamed him Skunk, and thereafter, if there was any question about the whereabouts of the tiny dog, Norah knew to search for him at the cowboy camp on the other side of the corrals.

  Norah spent Friday doctoring the script in one of the white tents of Queen Vashti’s troops, which did double duty as a dressing room and the home of the Red Bluff mah-jongg club. Christine and Emily kept looking over her shoulder and suggesting things they’d like to do: “Can’t you please write in a scene for me with naked dancing boys, darling?” Periodically Hraldy would burst in, seize a handful of pages, and shout, “Yes! YES! Bravissima!” causing Buttercreme to retreat under one of the cots and challenge him in a voice like a trodden-upon rubber toy. Fallon tried once to insinuate himself into the game, but the dogs would have none of him.

  “Besides,” added Christine, meticulously assisting Roberto Calderone and Mrs. Violet in building the Great Wall of China on the plank table in their midst, “Blake never showed the slightest interest in playing before this, so he can just sit outside with the extras and talk about showgirls.” She grinned wickedly at the thought of his frustration and lit another cigarette.

  Because of the huge inconvenience of night location shooting, her hours were largely limited to daylight, which was short anyway because of the season. She looked better than she had in weeks and, Norah noticed, seemed to consume far less liquor and no cocaine.

  If she walked around a great shoulder of red rock, Norah could see the stuntmen on the battlefield figuring out charges, troop maneuvers (including Laban the Splendid’s miraculous reappearance with a previously unaccounted for battalion of vengeful Israelites), and chariot falls.

  The men worked in baggy trousers and undershirts—to Christine’s loudly expressed admiration—brown muscles standing out like braided leather as they flung themselves casually here and there or walked the courses they would ride, over and over, timing out exactly where the sand had been poured for a softer landing or precisely where a partner was going to wheel his horse aside. Christine seemed to have forgotten her ambitions of seducing the hapless cello player and had fallen violently in love with a shy youth named Monty.

  Watching them, Norah thought again of Keith Pelletier. A good stunter, Alec had called him. She could not imagine a sedentary and elderly inebriate like Charles Sandringham being able to kill one of these men or even take one by surprise.

  According to the paper, which still carried the story under the urging of “informants in Hollywood,” nothing had been stolen from the house. Though, of course, after Brown and Fishbein had been through the place, who could tell?

  So, Shang had said, I see... And something about the look in his eyes, the quality of his voice, told her did he did see... something. Something when she had told him that the boy was a stuntman. Not just horror. Recognition. Pieces falling into place. But pieces of what, she could not tell.

  Chinatown, Alec had said.

  At Norah’s feet Black Jasmine gave a gruff little yak, as if satisfied that the latest tumble—both horses going down and sideways, the chariot fishtailing, and the driver and the warrior rolling in a long, slapping dive—was up to his standards. The horses scrambled to their feet, obviously unhurt, shaking the dust indignantly from their manes, while the beautiful Monty and a leathery expert named Smoky Hill Dan, after a moment of motionless death, leaned up on their elbows and grinned.

  Pelletier had done that, Norah thought. Pelletier, who had wanted to meet Mr. Fairbanks and become a star and had been willing to prostitute himself to do it. Pelletier who had grinned—Jesus, honey, if you wait to be invited in this town, you’ll never go anywhere!—and steered his elderly erastes to the speakeasy in the back room. Pelletier who had ended up dead in the reeking shadows of that silent little house, the house with blood trailing down its hall and tooth marks on its foundations and a mirror smashed to oblivion on the wall.

  What would leave marks like that?

  Shang Ko knew. Of that Norah was positive. She had been too tired, too rushed, too confused at the train station, but upon their return she would force him to tell her something besides the fact that the stars were not in a good aspect for the women he seemed determined to take under his wing.

  Shang Ko was still on her mind when they returned to Red Bluff at close to ten that night to find the place awash in extras. Most were unemployed from the streets of Los Angeles, unshaven and dirty and not caring much what they did or how well they did it. Others were Mexican farm workers out of jobs for the winter or unskilled laborers, men who’d come west looking for fortunes in the golden land. But there was a fair salting of men who knew what they were doing, Gower Gulch cowboys or soldiers who’d campaigned with Griffith and DeMille on a score of biblical battlefields, and these Hraldy enlisted as corps commanders and standard-bearers.

  Everyone who knew anything about filming and could be trusted to follow orders was impressed to the colors as well. During a late conference in Frenchy’s, while Lucky cleared up the ruins of a truly fearsome assault on the food supplies, Norah took notes on a battle plan that would require Deacon Barnes (mysteriously revived from death), Doc LaRousse, Ned the lesser, and Jeffrey the flute player all to lead troops under the Persian king; when she left, they were debating whether the diminutive Mrs. Violet could be inconspicuously fitted into armor as well.

  Wardrobe tents had been set up opposite Frenchy’s, open-fronted, glowing like stage sets and swarming with men. Against the desert darkness the yellow glare had a brittle quality, fragile and inadequate on the faces of the extras: plain or craggy or soft, a da Vinci catalogue of noses, chins, warts, and hairlines. Like soldiers before any battle, Norah thought.

  Something stabbed inside her, bitter pain that she had thought long laid.

  Faces like that had surrounded Jim when he’d been assigned his uniform, his weapons, his place in the line of battle. Family men or loners, educated or laborers, artists or stockbrokers or would-be architects with one year of training yet to go...

  They’d all crowded like that, she supposed, in a line to get what they needed for the following day, cracking jokes or smoking cigarettes. As men had done, she supposed, before every battle, even back in the days about which they were making this ridiculous epic.

  Only Jim happened to be there the day they handed out bullets with the guns. Jim happened to stumble into one of the periods when the army wasn’t just out for ten dollars and a couple of meals.

  Norah stood still in the darkness, the sudden heat of tears searing her eyes. It was only time and chance, she thought despairingly, that had put him in that army in Belgium instead of this one in this silly desert full of cowboys and fake palaces and cheap tin swords. For a moment, as she watched the faces, she thought surely she would see him there, black hair falling over his eyes, laughing as he used to.

  The crowd parted and moved, but it wasn’t Jim’s face she glimpsed in the jaundiced splintery light.

  To her astonishment—astonishment that wiped from her mind all thought of the world’s injustice—the face she thought she saw was Shang Ko’s.

  TWELVE

  EARTH OVER WATER

  An army on the march must be disciplined,

  else disaster will strike even the strongest...

  An army may have fatalities...

  An omen for the taking of prisoners...

  “DOESN’T IT HURT the horse?” Christine regarded the rigged chariot with some concern and reached out an assured hand to stroke the nearer of the glossy black team.

  “Shucks, miss, not if it’s done right.” Smoky Hill Dan finished rolling his cigarette and stowed the makings in a little washed-leather pouch hanging from his belt since the blue and crimson charioteer’s kilt he wore had no pockets. With his hair hidden by a close-fitting leather helmet and with high boots laced to the knees, he still looked like nothing
but a cowboy: big, competent brown hands, squint-lined gray eyes, and a light coat of body makeup to cover the fact that his chest, arms, and thighs were nearly as pale as Christine’s, in contrast to his sunburned face.

  “Lot of people claim a runnin’ W is cruel on the horse. Hell, so’s a curb bit if it’s handled by someone who’s got no business handling it.” He flicked a fragment of tobacco from his lip. “You time it right and have your fella undercrank the camera a little, and I can put that team down on the mark easy as a daddy flippin’ a kid up onto his lap, and twice as gentle.”

  “Personally,” said Emily, who was standing at the back of the small group gathered around the chariot, “I’d worry about myself, not the horse.” Unlike Christine, clothed in glittering silver armor whose form-fitting fragility could not possibly have protected her in anything like a real battle, Emily wore a girlish pink voile frock with a wide lace collar. She had finished her scenes with Roberto Calderone the previous day and was only along—complexion guarded by wide-brimmed hat, veils, and a very nineties parasol—to view the battle.

  “Oh, pooh.” Christine made an airy gesture. “When I was—” She visibly bit back the words married to Clayton, a secret to which no one in Hollywood was privy. “When I was a little girl in South Carolina, my cousins took me hunting with them all the time. I fell off twice, and it never did me any harm.”

  The charioteer grinned. “That’s the spirit, miss. I bet after a day’s work you fall into an easy chair harder’n you’ll hit that sand.”

  Norah glanced over at the target area. The previous night Ned the lesser had dug a pit some six feet in diameter by nearly two feet deep, which had been filled in with empty cardboard boxes and then covered with loose sand. Bits of weed and scrub had been transplanted to mask the join with hard ground. With some regret, Hraldy had been talked into allowing Christine’s torso to be almost fully covered by silver armor: “I told them,” said Mary DeNoux firmly, “that if she isn’t covered when she hits the sand, she’ll get scraped, and we can’t hide it with makeup for later shots or retakes.”

  Hollywood logic, thought Norah. Despite Smoky Hill Dan’s reassurances, she herself wouldn’t have wanted to be spilled out of that chariot no matter how carefully rehearsed it was.

  On the far side of a convenient rocky rise Felix Worthington-Pontchart had planted the charge that would simulate the lightning bolts of Jehovah’s wrath.

  “It’s quite simple, really,” explained the Englishman. “I push the plunger as you pass between those two rocks over there, and one-half second before you lay the horses down, there will be an explosion such as would do any man’s heart good to hear.” He pushed up his rimless spectacles and smiled with a child’s delight.

  Norah turned away. All yesterday, as she had watched the charge and countercharge of costumed extras—men waving swords and shouting as they fell upon other men with Western Costume spears, chariots falling, soldiers smiting one another, Ahasuerus and Esther gazing nobly down into the cauldron of fate, and finally Laban the Splendid’s troops and Jehovah’s lightning bolts arriving to save the day—she had been conscious of a horrible sense of split perspective, an emotion compounded of grief and indignation and anger stirring in her heart.

  She knew it was irrational. What she was seeing was just a spectacle, and not a particularly original one. Why it should trouble her she wasn’t certain. Only she knew that it did.

  It wasn’t Mikos Hraldy’s fault, or A. F. Brown’s, that Jim Blackstone had been involved in the hellish reality of which this was only a frilled and absurd shadow. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Jim was dead. There was no reason for her to be angry.

  And she hadn’t been angry exactly. But she found it very, very difficult to listen to the director ordering Vashti’s soldiers to charge the bowmen of Persia.

  Considering the sheer chaos attendant upon filming a major battle sequence—maneuvers repeated over and over for different exposures and different angles, close-ups of men struggling and distant shots of wheeling troops, rolling clouds of dust and constant awareness of the changing sunlight, of the position of the new moon’s thin sliver among intermittent clouds of the daylight sky—it was astonishing that Alec had noticed. But as the previous night’s darkness fell, he had come over to the small dressing and mah-jongg tent where she sat absently stroking Black Jasmine’s fur and asked her, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” She looked up from the cot upon which she was sitting with her best I’m fine, just tired smile.

  Alec, covered with sweat-runneled dust, had raised her to her feet and led her gently but firmly away into the shadows of the towering rocks. The shouted commands of Ned the greater and his corps chiefs faded to flat echoes no louder than distant hammer blows, and the dove-colored light seemed to swallow the jingly chaos that surrounded Christine, Emily, the breakdown of the tents, and the retrieval of the spare greasepaint tubes, water tanks, cots and cushions, and stray mah-jongg tiles.

  Small winds sniffed among the rocks. Dry shrubs and stalky weeds stirred and were still. Ground squirrels dashed for cover. Somewhere an insect rattled with a harsh, buzzing noise.

  Alec sat her down on a rock. “What is it?” His glasses made two neat rings in the dust on his face. One of Norah’s many jobs that day had been to fetch a cup of water and a clean handkerchief every few minutes to keep the lenses clean, his own and the camera’s.

  She shook her head again. “It’s silly.”

  “Nothing’s silly.”

  She sighed and brought it out as she would have brought out a tale of a burned dinner or a demolished car, all of a piece. “It’s just—my husband was killed in battle. It’s a bit hard for me to watch them playing at it.”

  There was a long silence. The shadows thickened from silk to velvet, purpling to black. The voices of the extras diminished as the desert took them back, but Alec made no move, as if this conversation, the thing that had been said and could be said, were of greater importance than their own or Christine’s dinner.

  At length he said, “I know. My sister’s husband beat her nearly to death with a mop handle. It was a long time before I could watch a Punch and Judy show.”

  “It’s just...” Her voice came out thin as thrice-ground glass, and she waved angrily, trying to get enough breath to speak. “It’s just that I loved him so much.”

  For a moment she sat upright, tears streaming down her face, her hands in her lap. Then Alec sat down beside her, gathered the bony awkward height of her against his shoulder, and held her like a brother... as Sean would have... the corner of his glasses poking her in the side of the head and their knees and shoulders bumping, not quite fitting.

  And through it all, through the blinding hurt that she thought she’d left behind in a freezing attic in Manchester and the tears that she didn’t think were left in her, some portion of her mind kept repeating, What would Jim think? What would Jim think?

  But she knew quite well what Jim would think, because Jim had told her what he thought on his last furlough. “I hate to think about you lying in anybody else’s arms,” he had said, running his palm gently along her bare arm, cupping her shoulder, her elbow, her breast, as if he, like she, were memorizing a physical reality against the darkness to come. “But if something should happen to me, I don’t want to think about you living your life alone.”

  He’d meant it, too. He hadn’t realized how alone she would be when influenza finished the carnage the war had begun. He certainly couldn’t have foreseen that she’d end up in this bright-colored Oz of palm trees, oil derricks, ersatz Spanish castles, and unlikely weather.

  At some point, long after dark, she said, “I don’t know how Christine can stand it.”

  “Chris hasn’t got your imagination.” He raised his head a little against the dusty mat of her hair. “The costumes help. They make it less real, disguise what it really is both for the actors and for the people who’ll see it on the screen. It’s like the people who read Anna Karenina, and bec
ause it’s in Russia they can say, ‘Oh, that’s not my pain they’re talking about.’ And Chris is tough. She goes from one thing to the next and doesn’t worry about the past. When a cat sits mere purring on your lap, you know for a fact she isn’t thinking about her former owner; she’s thinking about her dinner. That’s Chris.”

  Norah laughed softly and owned that he had a point. What else she said to him that evening she didn’t know: anger at Brown, at Hraldy, at the war that had brought her the most precious thing in her life and then had taken it away again. He did ask her if she was angry at him for not going. The question surprised her. “I was always against the war,” she said. “My whole family was. It’s just that we didn’t really have a choice.”

  When they walked hand in hand back to the edge of the day’s battlefield, all that remained there, like a spot of tar against the pale blur of sand amid the trash of vanquished armies, was one battered black Ford with COLOSSUS lettered on the door. Having told Christine of Fallon’s subterfuges to get her alone, she knew she could count on her sister-in-law’s sense of mischief to keep him at arm’s length until she returned.

  And today she felt better watching Hraldy line up the close-up shots, seeing them, as Alec had said, as a kind of Punch and Judy show in questionable taste.

  Christine mounted the chariot. Smoky Hill Dan reined expertly around and cantered the horses across the desert to the stake that marked the farthest point of the camera’s pickup, the light vehicle bouncing over ground that had been flattened and cleared for yesterday’s battle.

  The course of the charge would be east to west, along the foot of the uneven rock hills that ringed the battlefield. Outdoor scenes were invariably aligned with the camera pointing north or south to prevent glare, backlights, or the shadow of the cameraman intruding into the illusion that this really was 480 B.C. Norah suspected that part of the reason for this battlefield’s popularity among film companies was the fact that it was a long oval oriented east-west, with sufficient roughness around the edges to make it interesting but smooth enough to permit impressive charges. She wondered if in some former era it had been the bed of a long-vanished lake.